Thursday, March 13, 2014

New tech will make cellphones use less energy

How is pCell better than 4G or LTE?

Besides speed and signal strength, it uses a lot less power. pWave
radios use a 1-milliwatt transmitter to deliver data, compared with the
250 milliwatts used by most Wi-Fi radios and even larger amounts of
power used by cellular towers.
They also use less power on the user's end, too: phones as they exist
today would waste far less power searching for a signal, and one day
"pCell Native" devices could use parts that use even less power than the
Wi-Fi chips built into devices like the iPod Touch today.
Going back to the carrier side of things, pCell also brings
significant reductions in the amount of infrastructure needed to power a
cell network. Unlike cell towers, which need a massive fiber
infrastructure to provide enough bandwidth for all their users, pWaves
can be deployed in enough locations that each unit can "see" another
unit, meaning they can bounce data around using line-of-sight radio
waves for far less money. And instead of using custom hardware to handle
all signal processing, a carrier using pCell can run the software
behind it on any sufficiently powerful Linux computer.

Will I need a new phone to use pCell?

Nope. To make adopting the technology as easy as possible, Artemis
engineered pCell to work with regular LTE devices — so when it's ready,
your iPhone or Android device should already be compatible. That also
means you'll be able to use your phone on a pCell network and still have
it work when you go somewhere that's still running regular LTE cellular
service.
With that said, there will be some devices made "pCell Native" that
will use less power (and thus get better battery life) than regular
LTE-compatible devices.